The payments process which was launched officially by RBI governor Raghuram Rajan on April 11 in Mumbai was in the final stages of integration and testing with the banks and the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).

MUMBAI: Unified Payments Interface (UPI), the brainchild of the Reserve bank of India (RBI) which is expected to revolutionise peer to peer payments in the country is ready to be launched on Thursday said two people in the know of the matter. The bank applications will be made available on the Play Store for download by retail users.

In an interaction with ET a month back, NPCI chief operating officer, Dilip Asbe had said, "We are trying to sort out the initial hiccups and issues both from the side of NPCI as well as the clients side, once the final level of testing is over we are hoping to go live with atleast 15 banks by July 31."

However, given the complexity of the process with so many stakeholders involved like the customers, the banks and the clearing house there were expecting initial technical hiccups and integration problems. NPCI took the extra time to smoothen out the processes which delayed the launch by a month.

According to people in the know of the matter, though banks were prepared with their UPI applications along with smooth integration it also required clearance from the highest level of the RBI which was also something that caused it to be held up.

NPCI had kept an internal criteria for the pilot of UPI that only lenders with thousand pilot customers, five thousand transactions and 90% success rate for transaction will be allowed to go live.

In the first stage the likes of ICICI Bank, Axis Bank and few others are going live on UPI. However India's largest lender State Bank of India is yet to have an UPI app but they have said that they are in the process of developing the application.

Unified payments is supposed to do away with the whole business around adding a beneficiary for peer to peer online payments. Through UPI the customer can download any bank's UPI app on his smartphone, just add the amount to be transferred, provide the beneficiary's UPI handle and click send. Money will be transferred through the IMPS railroad in real time. Payments can be made between friends, to merchants and even to delivery boys instead of doing cash on delivery.

"The target is to get the small value peer to peer payments made digitally through UPI, the existing modes like NEFT and IMPS are mostly being used for high value payments and remittances," said Asbe.